The Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, made a press conference last week during which he admitted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had allocated nearly one billion dollars to rejuvenate the old city. The concept is to make it attractive to the four- billion potential tourists who would love to visit the sacred places.Part of the five-year master plan is to impose a Jewish character to the old city, irrespective of Islamic or Christian historical monuments or places of worship.
It was within this context that the Palestinian foreign ministry appealed to the Quartet to stop the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, from demolishing twenty thousand homes for Arabs, on the pretext that they had no building license from his office. It is a common practice among Israeli officials not to issue a building license or permit for an Arab home before ten years of waiting, and the fees are normally twenty thousand dollars, which tempts many Palestinians not to submit their applications. The Arab population in East Jerusalem is 375,000 which is roughly 40 per cent of the city total population. Barkat’s move is one of the tactics aiming to coerce Palestinians to leave the city, facilitate the demographic Judaization of the capital, and encourage two hundred thousand settlers to take the place of those two hundred thousand evicted Palestinians.
Such measures blatantly violate the Geneva convention which forbids an occupying power from the right to build or demolish homes or structures in the occupied territory. It might be part of a dramatic irony that the Geneva conventions were drafted as an expression of solidarity with the sufferings of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. Now, we see the second generation of survivors inflicting the same sufferings on Palestinians.
Such shortsighted policies breed violence among Palestinians.The four rabbis who were knifed to death in a Jerusalem synagogue on November 18, 2014 were the vicarious victims of those Palestinians suffering from the humiliation of Jerusalem mayors.
The killing of three seminary students in Hebron led to the July-August Gaza war, which had 2,100 Palestinians and 70 Israelis killed.
A continuation of Barkat’s policy of Judaization in Jerusalem, demographically and geographically, will create more Arab reactions, in lone wolf operations, using construction vehicles to kill Israeli pedestrians or slaying hitch hikers. A new culture of death is being forced on Palestinians by Israel’s occupation policies in the Holy City. A Jewish sage once said,” there are many types of terror, but the worst are the religious ones”. It is Israeli practices in the Holy City which will constitute the powder keg.
